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Abstract:

In the Soviet poetry of 1941–1945 pathetics and satire, the heroic, the tragic and the comic coexist. This is true in relation both to literature in general and to publications in concrete periodicals, including major newspapers and magazines published by “Pravda”. Poetry as a weapon of struggle, returning to the classicist genre’s focus on pathos, is not divided into “high” and “low”. The common goal of pathetic and satirical poems is to give confidence in victory, emphasize that “our cause is just”, and inspire hatred of enemies. Pathetics express the desire for an ideal directly, while satire expresses the ideal through denunciation and ridicule of the anti-ideal. The article analyzes works published in the first month of the Great Patriotic War in “Pravda” newspaper and “Krokodil” magazine, as well as the poems published in “Pravda” during the Battle of Stalingrad and the break of the siege of Leningrad in January–March 1943, and in April 1945: the pathos, poetics, style, and genre features of the poems by N. Aseev, D. Bedny, A. Bezymensky, E. Dolmatovsky, V. Inber, S. Marshak, A. Surkov, N. Tikhonov, S. Shchipachev, and others. It proves that both pathetics and satire helped to solve the main goals of the wartime poetry of “Pravda”, that was supposed to influence the mass newspaper audience.

Кeywords: satire, poetry, “Pravda”, the Great Patriotic War, N. Aseev, D. Bedny, S. Marshak.